Essential Politics: Sports spat starts with California teams and brings politics to the football field

It was one of those incredibly newsy Fridays — with breaking stories on North Korea, healthcare and even Russian interference in our election — but still the day somehow managed to be eclipsed by the weekend's national political drama over one of America's favorite pastimes.

The Trump sports spat all started Friday night when the president was campaigning for Sen. Luther Strange ahead of Alabama's special Senate election. It wasn't much of an endorsement for Strange, since Trump instead went afterKim Jong Un, Hillary Clinton and Colin Kaepernick.

On Saturday, the Golden State Warriors said that, instead of a visit to the White House, they would use the February trip to Washington "to celebrate equality, diversity and inclusion — the values that we embrace as an organization."

And not to be left out: the fans. At the StubHub Center in Carson, where Los Angeles Chargers fans were gathered to watch the team battle the Kansas City Chiefs, reporter Hailey Branson-Potts found plenty on both sides of the debate.

It's interesting to look back to the USC/Los Angeles Times poll from last fall, which found huge partisan divisions in how California voters viewed Kaepernick at the time. Democrats liked him more, while he had just 6% favorability among tea party Republicans here. The state was evenly divided on whether to support his protest during the national anthem. (Even a quarter of people who didn't like Kaepernick thought the protests furthered a dialogue about policing and race.)

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsompromised single-payer backers that, should he be the next governor, "I will lead the effort to get it done. We will get universal healthcare."

One of his Democratic rivals, Antonio Villaraigosa, accused Newsom of "parsing" his position on government-financed healthcare, and specifically, the controversial state bill that sputtered earlier this year

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Even as he came to San Francisco on Friday to evangelize for single-payer, Sanders first took on the role of Obamacare defender. He urged supporters to mount an aggressive opposition to the latest GOP effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

CLIMATE ALLIANCE GROWS

On the same day Trump announced he would withdraw the country from the Paris agreement on climate change, California joined with New York and Washington to pledge their commitment to the goal. The U.S. Climate Alliance has since grown to 15 members, including Puerto Rico, and on Wednesday it added North Carolina. Gov. Jerry Brown was in New York for a press conference intended to demonstrate to the world that some states are still making progress despite resistance from Trump.

OIL COMPANIES ON THE HOOK FOR CLIMATE CHANGE?

San Francisco and Oakland have been looking at potentially billions of dollars in costs when it comes to preparing for the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels. On Wednesday the city attorneys announced a lawsuit against five major oil companies, saying they should have to foot the bill because they helped cause the problem despite knowing the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

VICTORY FOR GAS TAX FOES

In a rare court rebuke of the state attorney general's office, a judge said that the title and summary written for a proposed initiative is misleading — and that he'd do a rewrite himself to make it clear the measure would repeal recently approved increases to gas taxes and vehicle fees.

Patrick McGreevy reports that Sacramento Superior Court Judge Timothy M. Frawley said he would draft a new title and summary to be placed on petitions for the initiative after attorneys for the state and proponents of the ballot measure could not agree on compromise language.

Seema Mehta traced Villaraigosa's arc from union organizer to union critic, reporting that it's a remarkable evolution that could lead to one of the state's most powerful interests trying to sink his gubernatorial campaign.

Meanwhile, California Republicans desperate to avoid another shutout on the ballot next fall, might change their rules to create an endorsement process to increase their relevance in statewide races and avoid an embarrassing repeat.

Next year's elections were also the focus of a big party thrown Saturday night by Orange County Democrats, who declared "orange is the new blue" and had Rep. Keith Ellison as a guest speaker.

With hundreds of bills now sitting on his desk, Brown has a big decision to make about a high-profile effort to force more disclosure of big political donors: Are the bill's details reasonable or risky?

In this week's Political Road Map column, John Myers looks at how questions over "earmarked" contributions -- money bundled in small amounts from individual donors -- have led the chairwoman of the state's campaign watchdog agency to suggest Brown veto the bill.

TODAY'S ESSENTIALS

-- This week's California Politics Podcast episode tackles the effect of a new state lawsuit challenging Trump's border wall and Brown's setback for a sweeping water infrastructure project.

-- California Republicans haven't said much about their thoughts on the Graham-Cassidy bill to repeal Obamacare, but James Veltmeyer, a GOP challenger running against Rep. Scott Peters of San Diego, came out in support last week.

-- A group calling itself the "SoCal Health Care Coalition" ran ads online last week urging Republican Congress members to oppose the Graham-Cassidy bill. But it's not clear who was really paying for them.

-- You might have never heard of Pat Harris, the little-known Democrat who's running for U.S. Senate against Dianne Feinstein. But he's treading ground familiar to many statewide candidates Monday by holding a big-ticket fundraiser in Hollywood.